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Hamill Wins Polk Career Award for Contributions to Journalism

February 18, 2014

Pete Hamill, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been awarded the George Polk Career Award in recognition of his lifetime contributions to journalism.

Hamill joins prior Polk Career Award honorees James Reston of the New York Times, Fred Friendly of CBS, and Bill Moyers of PBS.

Hamill, Matthieu Aikins (GSAS, '11), and Glenn Greenwald (Law, ’94) were among the winners of the 65th annual George Polk Awards in Journalism.

Aikins, a freelance journalist who has reported from Afghanistan for five years, won the Polk Award for Magazine Reporting for “The A-Team Killings” published in Rolling Stone. Aikins developed evidence that a 12-man U.S. Army Special Forces unit and their Afghan translators rounded up and executed 10 civilians.

Greenwald, along with Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras of the Guardian and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, won the Polk Award for National Security Reporting for investigative stories based on top-secret documents disclosed by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

The Polk Awards in Journalism, administered by Long Island University (LIU), are conferred annually to honor special achievement in the profession. The awards, “which place a premium on investigative and enterprise reporting that gains attention and achieves results,” LIU said in announcing this year’s winners, were established in 1949 by the university to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.

The 2013 Polk Awards will be presented at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel on April 11.

Hamill, a novelist and former editor of both the New York Post and New York Daily News, has authored more than 20 books, including News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century and A Drinking Life, as well as the novels Forever, North River, and Tabloid City. Hamill has reported on wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. He has been a columnist for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine, and Esquire.

Pete Hamill, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been awarded the George Polk Career Award in recognition of his lifetime contributions to journalism.